In the face of change, employees experience anxiety, which can lead to attrition. The lead author conducted a study with corporate executives who sought to empower employees during change. The study revealed some executives applied the hero’s journey, a storytelling framework, to engage employees. The hero’s journey is applied in literature, but there is scant research on its application in corporate settings. According to participants, by framing employees as heroes on a journey, leaders create a sense of purpose, reducing resistance and motivating teams through change. As companies face increasing disruption, storytelling could be a key to thriving during it.

We all know that work is personal. “What do you do?” is often the first question among strangers at parties. That is why business change is undeniably challenging for employees. According to Ashforth and Mael (1989), employees who associate their identities with that of the company for which they work may view change as a disruption not only to their work but also to their sense of self. Uncertainty that comes with change can cause anxiety, disengagement, and attrition. Companies change for many reasons, and even when change is the consequence of a positive development, it causes disruption.

As a corporate communications executive in a doctoral program in learning and organizational change, I (Michele) embarked on my own journey to understand how business leaders can help employees stay engaged and motivated during change. For my dissertation, I conducted a qualitative multiple case study with executives from companies that experienced change (Sharp, 2024; Sharp & Shelton, 2025). Specifically, my study involved five corporate executives who work at companies that are members of The Conference Board (2021), a global, non-profit think tank and business membership organization for corporate leaders. My study participants led change within the last decade at companies with over 35,000 employees, sought to empower employees during the change, and considered the change successful. Insights gathered from these executives shed light on actionable ways to motivate and engage employees during transformation.

The Hero’s Journey

The finding that surprised me the most was that two executives I interviewed used corporate storytelling in the style of the hero’s journey or a similar narrative structure to engage employees in change, thus suggesting that applying a storytelling approach overlaying the hero’s journey may help improve employee engagement. The hero’s journey is a framework describing a narrative structure involving a hero who is shaken from their current situation, adventures into the unknown, succeeds in a crisis, and returns home transformed. The hero’s journey contains 12 stages, as Joseph Campbell (1949) described, but scholars have condensed these stages into three overarching themes: departure, initiation, and return. It has been likened to the three acts of a play. Mythology and many significant works of fiction use the hero’s journey structure, but the literature connecting the hero’s journey narrative to corporate change management is scant.

Holder and McKinney (1992) overlaid aspects of the hero’s journey on several companies that experienced change. While not citing the hero’s journey specifically, Denning (2005) described eight narrative patterns aligned with business objectives and advised that readers attempting to share knowledge through stories use a structure like the hero’s journey. Denning explained, “If you want to make the story interesting to a wider audience, it needs to be transformed into a traditional ‘well-told’ story, with a human hero, plot and turning point” (p. 45). Busse et al. (2019) conducted qualitative research with employees who experienced organizational change to study parallels between storytelling structures, including the hero’s journey to corporate change. They developed a theoretical approach that suggests employees experiencing change benefit from a narrative approach and the simplification of complexity inherent in such change (Busse et al., 2019). Buganza et al. (2022) studied how employees become and remain engaged in change. They conducted workshops with employees, involving them in narrative creation and applying the hero’s journey concepts. Buganza et al. determined that when employees designed their own story about the business, including their personal transformation, it resulted in high engagement and meaningfulness.

Of the five cases in my study, two participants discussed applying narrative to build employee engagement during change. Elizabeth (pseudonym) described explicitly applying the hero’s journey. Mark (pseudonym) described using a narrative form to build engagement during change but did not specifically name the approach as being aligned with the hero’s journey.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth (pseudonym) was a global communications executive at Hawkingbird (pseudonym), a Fortune 500 biopharmaceutical company, at the time of the change. Her resume offered insights into her experience with change, including her leadership positions and change management strategies. Elizabeth described herself as having previously held leadership positions in large, multinational healthcare organizations that involved multiple business units and complex, matrixed reporting structures. She has led large corporations through repositions, mergers and acquisitions, and organizational changes through “authentic and inclusive leadership, direct communication style, and exemplary organizational skills.”

At Hawkingbird, Elizabeth led communications during a reinvigoration of the consumer business unit that had approximately 9,000 employees at the time of the change. She worked with leadership to develop and communicate the corporate narrative, vision, and strategy while engaging employees throughout the process of the business unit reinvigoration. Elizabeth explained that it became clear that a narrative was required once she asked a handful of executives about the company’s aspirations and received different answers. As a result, Elizabeth said she used a communications methodology of telling the company change narrative in a style modeled on the hero’s journey.

The narrative comprised six chapters. The first chapter was about pride and purpose. The second chapter explained the current reality of the company. The third and fourth chapters involved the strategy and implementation. The fifth chapter described the culture and the company’s brand. The sixth chapter was the destination chapter, which Elizabeth described in an interview as giving people “goosebumps” if done correctly. During an interview, she explained that the narrative she used at Hawkingbird told the story of the company’s direction and was intended to elicit employee buy-in, empowerment, and engagement. She said, “We worked with the leadership to develop the narrative of that business unit, and once we developed that narrative… it doesn’t stop there. You have to connect people to the narrative. You have to enable people to understand their role in each of the chapters, so they walk away not only understanding the strategy but also their role in the strategy.”

During the change at Hawkingbird, Elizabeth was focused on telling the story and involving employees in it. She described how she conducted an exercise with leadership after the narrative project, having them explain their perspective on their role in the story’s context. She said, “By the time you go through all six chapters and you’ve answered all the questions, you not only have a very clear understanding of the corporate strategy, but you’ve also reflected on your role in the success of that strategy.” According to Elizabeth, participating in the narrative exercise helped employees know what they needed to do to generate the outcomes the company aimed to achieve.

Mark

Mark (pseudonym) was a global marketing executive at a Fortune 100 food company, Shinerunner (pseudonym), at the time of the change. Shinerunner had business units in different countries and regions worldwide, with marketers focused on dozens of brands in each region. Mark’s role was to restructure and transform the marketing function to make it global and create growth opportunities outside the United States. One of his top priorities was engaging employees in the company’s future vision. He said everyone in the company needed to buy into its mission. During an interview, Mark said all employees, from the chief financial officer to those working in the factories, had to be aligned with Shinerunner’s purpose. He said, “The employee dynamic here was critical, and maybe halfway through my tenure [in 2019], we started working on articulating the global corporate strategy. And so, working with the communications team actually, rather than the marketing team, we developed a new mission.”

Mark explained that employees were empowered to vote on the company’s new mission from among several options, which helped galvanize support for the company. He described how the new mission motivated employees through the COVID-19 pandemic. During an interview, he explained, “Suddenly, COVID hits around the world, and remember we’ve got factory workers. We’re shipping food, and you know, a lot of food went out of stock. But we had the strategy and an aligned vision for how we were going to execute against that, so the purpose: put people first. So yeah, we were supplying food shelves around the world from day one, not waiting for a disaster to happen because that was our mission.”

Mark understood that employee buy-in was critical to the success of the business. Therefore, the storytelling to improve engagement continued beyond the collaborative development of the mission to include employees as the story’s heroes. He explained during an interview that at Shinerunner, employees did not simply make food; instead, they helped children develop strong bones so they could have more fun on the playground. He said, “Every single person at the company has a role to play in making great happen… without everybody going, ‘I’ve got a part to play in this, and I’m gonna play my part to my maximum potential,’ I think you run the risk of any change not working.”

While Mark did not explicitly apply the hero’s journey at Shinerunner, he used a similar storytelling approach to engage front-line factory employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the marketing leader, Mark helped Shinerunner develop a new mission in collaboration with employees. Then, when the company faced supply chain issues during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark helped deliver the corporate narrative to help factory workers understand that they were not simply making food but helping people become healthy and strong. According to Mark, the factory workers believed they were performing a vital role in the company. In this way, the factory workers were the heroes on the journey.

Corporate Narrative Comprises Beginning, Middle, and End; Employees are the Heroes

In addition to using a corporate narrative style reflecting the hero’s journey, Elizabeth and Mark implicitly described the corporate changes they led as falling into the three-act categories of departure, initiation, and return. For Elizabeth, the departure was caused by the reinvigoration of the consumer business unit. The initiation involved refocusing the business unit around the company’s new vision. The successful completion of the change marked the return. For Mark, the departure was caused by the need to transform the marketing department. Amid this change, he also helped the company develop and articulate a new mission that he believed inspired employees through the COVID-19 pandemic. The return involved the conclusion of the transformation and the subsiding of the pandemic.

Leveraging Hero’s Journey Elicited Positive Results, According to Corporate Leaders

Elizabeth and Mark described their perceptions of positive results from the storytelling effort, which supports the theoretical framework Busse et al. (2019) set forth, which suggested employees benefit from narrative storytelling. Elizabeth described employees as benefitting by understanding the corporate strategy underpinning the change and their role in it. She said that as a result of the hero’s journey storytelling exercise, employees accepted the change and engaged in the work to make the change successful. Mark described his belief that employees gained an understanding of their core purpose, resulting in greater productivity, easier recruitment, and longer tenure.

Potential Application of Hero’s Journey in Corporate Change Management

The success stories shared by Elizabeth and Mark underscore the potential of applying the hero’s journey narrative to corporate change management. By framing employees as the heroes of the journey and the corporate narrative as an adventure with a clear beginning, middle, and end, leaders can help connect employees to the business strategy on a personal level. This research can provide insight for leaders as they develop communication strategies to navigate change.

References

1. “About Us,” The Conference Board, December 2021.
2. Blake E. Ashforth and Fred Mael, “Social Identity Theory and the Organization,” The Academy of Management Review 14, no. 1 (1989): 25.
3. Tiziano Buganza et al., Storymaking and Organizational Transformation: How the Co-creation of Narratives Engages People for Innovation and Transformation (1st ed.; New York: Routledge, 2022), 125.
4. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949), 42.
5. Stephen Denning, “Transformational Innovation,” Strategy and Leadership 33, no. 3 (2005): 14.
6. Michael Sharp, “How Executives Describe Empowering Employees During Corporate Change: A Multiple Case Study” (EdD diss., Baylor University, 2024), ProQuest (31563875), 58.
7. Michael R. Sharp and Rebecca N. Shelton, “How Executives Describe Empowering Employees During Corporate Change: A Multiple Case Study,” Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Advanced online publication, 2025.

Acknowledgement

The material in this article is developed from the lead author’s Problem of Practice Dissertation: Sharp, M. (2024). How Executives Describe Empowering Employees During Corporate Change: A Multiple Case Study [Ed.D. Problem of Practice Dissertation]. Baylor University.